Motivation, Stress and Communication Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Motivation, Stress and Communication - Essay Example Job Design Considerations as Human Resources Manager As a human resource manager in Home Depot, the a job design involves, which planning directing, and coordinating human resource management activities in the organization in order to increase the strategic use of human resource and maintenance of function like employee recruitment, compensation, personnel policies and regulatory compliance. The human resource manager has been charged with the responsibility of identifying staff vacancies and recruiting, interviewing and selecting applicants, allocating human resource, ensuring appropriate matches between personnel and providing current and prospective information to the employee concerning job duties, working conditions, wages, opportunities for promotion and benefits. Moreover, the HRM performs the duties of staffing, which include understaffing, refereeing, firing, administering disciplinary procedures, advising managers on matters related to equality in employee opportunity and recommending changes. Use of Goal Setting to Motivate Performance Goal setting can be applied for motivating performance through the Goal-setting theory of motivation, which was developed in 1960’s Edwin Locke, whereby it states that setting of goals is related to task performance (Lunenburg, 2001). The theory explains the specific and challenging goals and appropriate feedback that facilitates improvement in performance, since the goals offer guidance to employees concerning their needs, and the efforts that are required to achieve these objectives. These goals increase the willingness to work, thus making them a source of motivation, though there is a need for clear, particular and sophisticated goal as a motivating factor, instead of general, basic and vague goals. Therefore, the specific and clarification in the goals results to an increased performance, and goals are associated with deadlines for completion in order to avoid delays and misunderstanding. On the other hand, the goals are expected to be realistic and challenging, and it gi ves individuals a feeling of pride and triumph after attaining the set objectives, thus setting them up to achieve the next goal. In this case, a challenging goal is a substantial reward, and there is a passion associated with achieving, through appropriate feedback that guides the employees behaviors and contribute to increased performance is needed. Clarification, regulation of difficulties and attaining reputation are the purposes of feedback, and these assists the employees to work to facilitates more job satisfaction. There is a need to reinforce the increased performance through facilitates the sustenance of desired behaviors, thus creating the need for borrowing ideas from the Reinforcement theory of motivation that was proposed by BF Skinner and his associate. The theory states that the individual’s behaviors are functions their consequences and this is based on law of effect, whereby there are behaviors with positive consequence that are repeated others have negative effects, and they tend not to be repeated. The positive behaviors contribute to achievement of organizational goals while the negative behaviors reduce the efforts towards

Report of app design which is (Mnchester bus times) Essay

Report of app design which is (Mnchester bus times) - Essay Example Manchester bus time’s application has several features, which make it a favorite application for the users. The most distinguished element of the application is the route maps, which will empower all passengers on the various areas the buses, have access. The invention of route maps was to allow people to be well versed with different areas even those who may not know the area or bus network well. For this reason, route maps were a necessary feature on the application. Live information is another notable feature on the application and it entails notifying the passengers on the different undertakings of the buses. Through live information, feature passengers can have access to all the transport information they need without having to download or wait for prior schedules (Travel Manchester, pg 5, 2010). The live information feature will cut across all the modes of transportation- city buses, tram networks, and trains. In addition, the application has the feature of favorite stop s, which shows the transport networks’ regular stops. The Manchester bus time’s application has several usages the major one being provision of journey information to passengers in an accessible way. Before the invention of the application, the only accessible information concerning journeys was that from the operator’s point of view. This means that passengers could not have access to data that was relevant to their needs and had to work with the operators’ data. Since the inception of the application, passengers of public transport can now get journey data regarding different transport networks. Manchester Bus Time application has received enormous support from its users because of its ease of use. Manchester bus time application is a smart phone application, which means that passengers can have right to use all the transport information they require at the touch of a button on their smart

Indian Ocean Region Essay Example for Free

Indian Ocean Region Essay Change and Continuity of Commerce in the Indian Ocean Region from 650 CE to 1750 CE. The Indian Ocean has always been a powerful trading region, between East Africa and China, that has caused religion, crops, languages, and people to spread. Through the rise and fall of powerful land and sea empires, trade routes shifted and control switched hands numerous times over history. The goods have remained fairly constant, compared to the traders and the powers behind them that changed from 650 C.E. to 1750 C.E. Spices, textiles, manufactured goods, and raw goods were staples on the many of the routes that led from the coast of Zimbabwe all the way to the ports of China. Early traders from Polynesia even traveled to Madagascar. With the rise of Islam and of the Mongol Empire, overseas trade slowed slightly because of the importance of the Silk Road as the main connection between China and Europe. However, as the Mongols declined, the Indian Ocean trade became more important to the empires o r kingdoms of China and the regional powers of India. The Chinese Ming Dynasty engaged heavily in foreign trade and they displayed their wealth with giant treasure ships and junks that sailed the day from China through the port of Malacca to the east coast of India. The ships carried silk and porcelain, goods that were in high demand in Europe and Arabia. The ships also picked up spices and hardwoods from Southeast Asian islands. In India, the majority of these goods were sent on dhows to the Arabian Peninsula, stopping at major important ports like Aden, and then continuing on to East Africa and the Swahili Coast states of Mogadishu, Kilwa, and Sofala. The ships sailed according to the monsoons, they then returned loaded with gold and ivory from Africa, to China where the cycle would restart. Eventually states like Gujurat and Calicut grew in importance in manufacturing and the textile production of cotton. The powers around the Indian Ocean remained in control, until the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century. While Silk Road trade with Europe was thriving, Europeans wanted to cut out the Arab middlemen and get direct access to Asian goods. As the tools of navigation developed and new nation-states sought after trade and exploration, Portugal led the continent in the race to Asia. When Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498 by sailing around the tip of Africa, he was greeted with a mocking laughter of people he needed to trade with and was turned down most of the goods he had to trade. The powerful merchants of Gujarat and neighboring states were used to the highest quality goods so they did not want to trade with Gama’s poor quality goods. However, before long, Portugal took over almost all trade in the Indian Ocean, establishing ports like Goa in India and controlling strategic areas with their imperialistic manner. Around the same time, Britain also began its expansion and joined with joint-stock companies like the Dutch East India Company. They proceeded to dominate the region as well, taking land they thought suited their purposes. The sea empires and the cut off of foreign trade by the Ming dynasty did not greatly change the products traded, but did affect the overall trade system. Goods were now produced for the success of mercantilist people in European countries, not for the enrichment of local powers. While the trade routes and the goods that passed through them may not have been greatly changed, the impact of the European trading empires and the decline of nations like India and China changed who benefited from Indian Ocean trade and who were mostly involved.

Egon Schiele: Influences on and Impact in Art

Egon Schiele: Influences on and Impact in Art Was Egon Schiele ahead of his time or just in touch with it? A master of expressionism or practising pornographer and paedophile? What was the driving force behind his most memorable images; those being his nudes and self portraits? Looking at economic, social, personal influences, was he milking the times and environment for self gain or was he a hormone raging self absorbed youngster finding himself? Introduction Expressionism is described in typically polemic terms in the preface for the 1912 exhibition in Cologne, featuring new artists of this genre. In it, it says: â€Å"the exhibition is intended to offer a general view of the newest movement in painting, which has succeeded atmospheric naturalism and the impressionist rendering of motion, and which strives to offer a simplification and intensification in the mode of expression, after new rhythms and new uses of colour and a decorative or monumental configuration – a general view of that movement which has been described as expressionism.† Schiele certainly fulfilled the loose terminologies expressed above, as a great deal of the subject matter he explored, primarily his nudes and his self-portraits, were concerned with the constant need to redefine and explore different ways of expressing these themes; a simplification and intensification in the mode of expression. At times, Schiele reduces the broad sentiments of Impressionism to a single streak; he cuts out all that is unnecessary, reducing his backgrounds to a simple wash of colour, and thus focuses on his primary interest, that of the human subject. Schiele was also extremely concerned with the notion of self in his work; he is frequently cited in critical work as a narcissist and, with over 100 self portraits to his name, each of which appear to be concerned with showing himself in various, often contradictory ways, this would appear to be true. But, beyond simple glorification of the self, Schiele seems to be doing something else in his self-portraiture. By picturing himself in such a varied and at times contradictory way, Schiele in turn questions his own authenticity, and attempts to align himself with that great canon of artist in society, as a contemporary Promethean or Christ-like figure. â€Å"Allegory, unmasking, the presentation of a personable image, and close scrutiny of body language as influenced by the psyche, all met most palpably where Schieles eye looked most searchingly – in his self-portraits, his odyssey through the vast lands of the self. His reflections on and of himself filled a great hall of mirrors where he performed a pantomime of the self unparalleled in twentieth century art.† Indeed, the ambiguity of Schiele as regards himself is a dense and complex subject, which regards both â€Å"truth†, and a more subjective appraisal of art in Viennese society during the time in which Schiele was painting. Schiele was also concerned with breaking down and fundamentally opposing the traditions of Viennese culture and art which, at the time, were largely very conservative in opinion. In his art, Schiele would strike out at the culture that celebrated Biedermeier art and the slavish reproduction of classical works that he was taught at Viennas Academie der Bildunden Kunste (Viennas Academy of Fine Art), which he was admitted to on the grounds of his exceptional talent as a draughtsman. Most prominently, he would break these rules, and was thus ahead of his times with his extremely controversial oeuvre, which broke from these schools almost completely, both stylistically and in terms of the subject matter that they conveyed. But it is extremely difficult, if not impossible when considering any artist to extricate him / her from the times in which he / she was born. An artist is inevitably bound to the world around him / her, and thus, it is important to consider the economic, social and cultural trends that were prevalent at the time. Schiele was part of the expressionist movement – which immediately set itself up against the heralded principals of art in Vienna, by setting up its own artist-led business entities, using the work and the life of Klimt as an example. I will expand upon the layered history that led up to Viennese expressionism, and hope to extrapolate the extent to which Schiele was paving the way for a new generation of artists. Schieles art was especially controversial in its subject matter. In his early work especially, unflinching portraits were painted that not only showed Schiele in uncompromising positions, but also subjects such as proletariat children, who were invariably portrayed naked, and painted with a grotesque and sickly eroticism that draws you unerringly into these taboo areas. Whether Schiele was deliberately trying to shock and provoke the modesties of the Viennese public, or whether he was trying to uncover a more universal, spiritual or sexual truth is subject to debate. Overall, in this essay, I will discuss how the history of Vienna impacted upon the work of Schiele, looking at the cultural, social and economic impact of Schiele. I will also look at how Schiele uses the self-portrait, especially how he chooses to either promote, or at least define the prevalent role of expressionist artist in his work. Then I will look at how the abundance of these controversial self-portraits, along with innumerable photographs of Schiele posing, in turn makes Schieles identity in his work more ambiguous. Then I will look at the more pornographic side of Schiele, and question how Schiele, deeply embedded in the cultural and moral codes of the time, reacted entirely against them and established his own, art of â€Å"ugliness†. History Of Viennese Expressionism Fredrick Raphael, in his preface to Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler, suggests something about the Viennese psyche; he says that: â€Å"In 1866, Bismarcks Prussia destroyed Austro-Hungarys bravely incompetent army at Sadowa. The effect of that defeat on the Viennese psyche cannot be exactly assessed. Austria had already suffered preliminary humiliation by the French, under Louis-Napoleon, but Sadowa confirmed that she would never again be a major player in the worlds game. Yet conscious acceptance of Austrias vanished supremacy was repressed by the brilliance and brio of its social and artistic life. Who can be surprised that Adlers discovery of the inferiority complex, and of compensating assertiveness, was made in a society traumatized by dazzling decline? It was as if the city which spawned Arthur Schinitzler and Sigmund Freud feared to awake from its tuneful dreams to prosaic reality.† Indeed, the times in which Egon Schiele was making his mark on the Viennese establishment was a time where the Viennese art community were at their most conservative, or most susceptible to lapsing into these â€Å"tuneful dreams†. Schieles self-imposed mission, it seemed, was to violently shake these people into a state of consciousness. But that isnt to say that Schiele existed entirely in a vacuum, living entirely by his own rules. Comini stresses that: â€Å"The content of Schieles Expressionism then was a heightened sense of pathos and impending doom, and an acute awareness of the self. Schieles Expressionist form drew from the great European reservoir of Symbolist evocativeness.† So, from a veritable melange of varying influences, Schiele managed to get his form, which combined that of exceptional draughtsman, with an inescapable desire for portraying the artistry of â€Å"ugliness†, something of which Schiele was something of a pioneer. In 1897, Schiele joined the painting class of Christian Griepenkerl; who was a deeply conservative artist devoted to neoclassicism, or the slavish devotion and replication of classic works of art. This involved long hours copying the works of the Old Masters at Viennas Academy of Fine Art. Schiele was enrolled for his superior draughtsmanship, but he was eventually alienated from it because he didnt see the relevance or the importance in neoclassicism. Thus, he became something of a troublemaker to the establishment, and was eventually forced out. This was echoed 100 years hence by the Romantics; an art group who pursued a loose programme intended to reinvest art with emotional impact. The Romantics, however, proved too unpalatable to the Viennese citizenry, who instead preferred the work of Biedermeier artists. Kallir says: â€Å"On the whole, Germans proved more receptive to Romanticism than Austrians who shied away from such intense expressions of feeling and took refuge in the mundane cheer of the Biedermeier.† She goes on to say: â€Å"Biedermeier [†¦] was geared more to the applied than to the fine arts, though in all its myriad incarnations it promoted the personal comforts of the middle class Burger. Biedermeier painting revolved around idealized renditions of everyday life, scenes of domestic bliss, genre pictures portraying ruddy-cheeked peasants, and picturesque views of the native countryside.† Being born into this highly stringent, conservative environment must have shaped Schieles defiance somewhat, as Schiele not only seems to break with what was established in Vienna as profitable art, but he almost seems to occupy exactly the opposite role. Even in works by Klimt, who was deemed controversial at the time, there are still elements of decorative palatability that makes his work visually and aesthetically appealing. Schiele seems to be deliberately working against this formula; which was brave considering that art, at the time, depended on patronage and buyers to actually sustain a profit. Schiele didnt seem concerned in the slightest that his work wouldnt get a buyer. In fact, the market is abandoned almost completely. In Schieles early work, art becomes â€Å"ugly†; his figures are pallid and atrophied; the composition of the pieces are unconventional and thus attack the sensibilities of the audience. Upon his break from Viennas Academy, and much akin to Klimt, whom he admired and painted on a number of occasions, Schiele set up his own group, entitled simply, â€Å"The New Art Group.† This was similar to Klimts route, as he set up the Viennese Secession, of which Schiele would play a part, which came from and used the tried and tested formula of the Genossenschaft betdender Kunster Wiens (Vienna Society of Visual Artists), a project financed by Emperor Franz Josef as a means of promoting art in the city. However, this system was not without its drawbacks. â€Å"Its progressive potential was [†¦] undermined by a policy of majority rule, which generally granted victory to the conservative faction. Within this context, the societys role as dealer was particularly disturbing to the younger, more forward-thinking minority, from whom exclusion from major exhibitions could have adverse financial consequences.† Similarly, the capitalist nature of art, coupled with the conservatism of the market made for a very difficult time for the progressive artist, and perhaps was a reason behind why Schiele opposed the artistic community with such fervency and vitriol, and often resorted to shock tactics and self-publicity to get himself heard. Klimts Secession operated on similar principles to the Vienna society: â€Å"†¦the Secession [†¦] was principally a marketing agent for its members work.† Thus, again it proved difficult for the younger, more radical artists to break through, despite Klimts support. Later, funds from patronage dwindled, so it was necessary for artists to seek out new markets. â€Å"The withdrawal of official patronage pre-empted the Secessionists to seek new ways of generating the sales and commissions necessary to keep them in business.† Ultimately, this meant that socialist, and personal art became more prominent a theme. The monumental, allegorical themes that Klimt and Schiele tended to attack (although Schieles work was deeply personal, it was also very monumental and took a number of influences from Klimt and symbolist art), no longer had a substantial market. Klimts decorative style, coupled with his established name, could still sell work to his established clients. Schiele, however, had no such luck, and it was only in 1918, the last year of his life, that Schiele managed to break even with his work. Although Schiele did not seem overly concerned with the economic potential of his works; in fact, he even seemed to equate poverty and suffering to the role of an artist in general, and Schiele was probably one of the most uncompromising artists of the twentieth century in terms of pandering to a particular audience; it is nevertheless important to consider economics, social and cultural conditions because, Schiele, by setting himself and his role as an artist in direct opposition to the establishment, also put himself in the long-standing tradition of artist in opposition to mainstream society. Kallir points out that: â€Å"The Secession, the Galerie Muethke, and the Wiener Werkstatte [, the latter two being establishments set up in the wake of the gradual reduction of patronage funds and a need to find and establish new markets for art], in the formative first decade of this century were peculiar products of their times that shared common aspirations and limitations. It was important to all concerned that these entities, although ostensibly committed to marketing art, were artist-run.† So, although economics were a concern in art, they were not necessarily, as dictated previously with the majority run Vienna Society of Visual Artists, primarily about making money and transforming the Viennese art scene into a profitable industry. Economics was an incidental concern, only foisted upon the establishment by chronic necessity: â€Å"The artists evinced a tacitly accepted loathing for art-as-business (Schiele could be particularly eloquent on this point) and a determination to place aesthetic considerations above economic ones.† So, as is fairly obvious from the art that he made, Schiele was against the motive of making money from art. But this reveals an interesting contradiction that plagued expressionist and other, later artists seeking to make a living from art at the same time as challenging the social and economic processes that ultimately fund its creation: â€Å"[I]f the primary goal [of these entities] was to serve the artistic community, these organisations could not entirely ignore their secondary purpose: to sell art.† So, Schiele, like many other artists, was cut between a requirement for money (which was especially apparent now that the former staple of patronage monies had all but dried up), and a requirement to express uncompromisingly his artistic expression. Schiele would not settle for the former, and instead pursued the latter with a vigour and an intensity that, at the time, was quite extraordinary. Schiele and Self-Portraiture. Of all the artists in the 20th century, or indeed any century, Egon Schiele was probably one of the most self-conscious. But, in Schiele, the self is a very problematic subject. Schoeder suggests: â€Å"In his self-portraits, Schiele shows himself as wrathful, with a look of spiritual vacancy, or as if racked by a severe spasm of hysteria; or arrogantly looking down his nose, with head tossed back; or apprehensively or naively peering out of the picture. Which Schiele is the real Schiele?† Schiele seems to instinctively divide himself into differing components, but also, he uses art to singularly pursue his own political views of the role of artist, in many ways using self-portraiture to assert, rather than fragment his own personality. The ambiguity with which Schiele regards himself can be looked at in a number of ways. 1. The Artist-as-Martyr It could be argued that Schiele was simply posing, or playing the varying roles of artist to gratify his ego. This is interesting because Schiele was definitely working toward a specific identity as artist. In 1912, Schiele was arrested for three days for publishing obscene works where they could be displayed to children. An item of his work was subsequently burned in the courtroom. In prison, he creates a number of interesting works of art, that are especially interesting because their titles read like manifestoes. Titles such as Hindering the Artist is a Crime, It Is Murdering Life in the Bud! (1912), For Art and for My Loved Ones I Will Gladly Endure to the End! (1912), and Art Cannot Be Modern: Art Is Primordially Eternal (1912). Certainly, judging from these titles, Schiele definitely has a number of ideas regarding the artist, his specific role, and what separates a true artist from a charlatan. Schiele, in his highly polemical, hyperbolic painting titles, equates the artist with suffering and martyrdom, suggesting that he will â€Å"endure†, and immediately glorifying the artist as a giver of life and eternal well being to the masses. Schroeder goes on to say: â€Å"Behind these works lies the idealization of suffering in the Romantic cull of genius, as updated in the last years of the nineteenth century through the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche and through the posthumous response to Arthur Schopenhauer. [†¦] The turn of the century saw the apogee of the Artist-as-Martyr legend, in which the relationship between suffering and greatness draws so close that the pose of suffering may in itself constitute a claim to the higher grades of artistic initiation.† So, the implication here is that Schiele was indeed acting a specific role of artist, that he was assuming a specific â€Å"pose of suffering† that was in many ways an act of fulfilling his societal role as an artist. Certainly these roles of suffering were explicit in his work. In Self-Portrait Standing (1910), Schiele portrays himself as contorted and thin; his face is twisted into an ugly grimace, and the colours used are mottled, pale and rotten. His arms are deformed and his positioning is unnatural and forced. His eyes are hollow and there is no context to the portrait; the background is a simple cream colouring. To exaggerate his alienation yet further, Schiele highlights his body with a shock of white. This has the effect of drawing the subject even further out of his environmental world, and, along with the forced hand gestures, serves to make us see the subject as an exhibit, rather than as part of a natural world. As Schroeder points out: â€Å"On the white expanse of paper, they do not exist: they are exhibited.† In his principal work, Hermits (1912), he paints himself with Gustav Klimt, whose own break with neoclassicism and ornate style of expressionism was a major influence on Schieles early work. Klimt is seen as asleep, or else resting on the shoulders of Schiele, who stands in front of him in a large black cloak. Mitsch suggests that in Hermits, â€Å"[s]eldom has the human body been visualised so exclusively as a materialization of spiritual forces [†¦].† But the painting is called Hermits, which suggests something about the role of artist that Schiele observed, although the painting certainly displays elements of the spiritual; as Steiner suggests, â€Å"he presents the master and himself in a picture where two male figures in monklike garb and with aureoles about their heads are seen on a monumental plinth.† In Hermits, Schiele and Klimt both look glum; Schiele stares defiantly back through the painting. The vast black cloak serves to homogenize the body of Klimt and Schiele, and thus portrays the role of the artist in general as one of blackness, of a biblical darkness. But, the title is more secular: Steiner goes on to say that: â€Å"We see Hermits (as the painting is called) and not saints, and the tone is no longer mystical and remote but one of delicate equilibrium between the two men – the elder, Klimt, deathlike, and the younger, Schiele, looking grim, doubtless because the artist leads a solitary life, condemned by society to suffer.† So, Schiele, in a very modernist way, is simultaneously divorcing himself from the establishment of the religious school of Neoclassicism, but is also contemporising it. In similar ways that Freud brought scientific rigour, and secular practice into studies of the human psyche, Schiele was in turn taking religion out of mystical, allegorical artwork, and instead putting himself into it. This artistic position, as forerunner to Klimt, in a sense, emerging from the body of Klimt, but staring out defiantly and uniquely, epitomizes Schieles position. Steiner suggests that: â€Å"At the time that he painted Hermits, Schiele was already seeing himself as a kind of priest of art, more the visionary than the academician, seeing and revealing things that remain concealed from normal people.† 2. The Artist-As-Protean The ambiguity with which Schiele forges his own identity can also be seen in a different way. The variance between different forms of self-portrait merely represent different sides of the Schiele character. This would certainly fit into the Freudian notion of self – as a stigmatized, fragmentary and anarchic collection of different preconceived notions. For instance; Freuds basic notions of Id, Ego and Super-Ego serve to fragment the self – psychoanalysis in general serves to this effect, and, in a number of Schiele self-portraits, he uses the quite unusual system of the double portrait to encapsulate this fragmentation. Fischer makes the point that â€Å"[t]he familiar repertoire of Freudian psychology with its ego and super-ego, conscious and unconscious realms, might equally be applied to these dual self-portraits.† A great deal of photography of Egon Schiele (of which a great deal exists) utilizes the effect of double exposure, thus, a doubling of the self. In one untitled photograph of Egon Schiele , he is seen firstly staring into the distance, while another image of himself looks back, observing himself intently. Steiner says that: â€Å"Schiele countered the sensory fragmentation of the self by means of a multiple self which came little by little to form a visual concept which reconstituted his unity with the world in a visionary way.† Indeed, during the time when expressionism was most active, a serious redefinition was underway, on the secular, theoretical grounds of Nietzsche and Freud, and also due to the cataclysmic human and social catastrophe of the Great War. In Hermann Bahrs 1916 book, simply entitled Expressionism, he says: â€Å"Never was there a time so shaken with so much terror, such a fear of death. Never was the world so deathly silent. Never was man so small. Never had he been so alarmed. Never was joy so far away and liberty so dead.† But he rallies against this bleakness, which is encapsulated in other modernist and expressionist works; works such as Eliots Wasteland and the paintings of Munsch and the German school of expressionism: â€Å"Now necessity cries out. Man cries after his soul, and the whole age becomes a single cry of need. Art, too, cries with it, into the depths of darkness; it cries for help; it cries after the spiritual: that is expressionism.† So, by ploughing the ambiguities of the self, this reading would assume that Schiele was, in many respects, crying â€Å"after his soul†, so to speak; searching among the myriad of different identities available to him, a concrete or at least a compatible sense of self that had eluded him, along with an entire generation of artists dispossessed by the Viennese establishment. The various parts of Schieles meticulous, and almost surgical self-analysis falls into a number of distinct camps, but also seems to, in a more generalised sense, work against the pattern of self-portrait or nudity established by other artists. Up until that time, generally speaking, the nude was seen in a grandiose sense: the painted nude women, such as those in Degas, were painted as Goddesses, resplendently beautiful, radiant, often placed in scenarios that depicted frolicking jollity or natural equilibrium; and the men, who were much rarer in contemporary art, were generally seen as heroic, muscular and noble. Schiele breaks entirely with this long-established tradition. Firstly, the school of nude self-portraiture at the time only comprised of a single person; Richard Gerstl, whose painting Self-Portrait, Naked stood on its own at the time as the only painting to be done of the nude artist. Schroeder points out: â€Å"Just how uncommon is was to depict oneself naked is revealed by the fact that before 1910 only one precedent existed in the whole of Austrian art.† Thus, Schiele was already putting himself in the position of pioneer of a particularly exhibitionist genre. But, in unsheathing the artist of the attire that would previously assign to him his identity, Schiele places a whole new dynamic in the art: the dynamic of the self itself. One of Schieles most important works Seated Male Nude (1910), Schiele portrays himself covering up his own face. Indeed, in most of his self-portraits, especially his early ones, his posture is contorted and manufactured; he is posing and the background again is simply a plain, unembellished white. In Seated Male Nude, Schiele is grossly emaciated, his feet have been cut off, and his nipples and eyes glow red, suggesting that there is a deep demonism within him. He is seen as grotesquely, disturbingly ectomorphic; â€Å"the figure looks as though it has been taken down from a gothic crucifix: it is angular, and looks carved: Schiele was seeing himself as Christ without a loin-cloth. The red highlights of his eyes, nipples, navel and genitals make the body look as if it were glowing from within.† But, also, the red â€Å"glowing from within† also exposes another central tenet of Schieles work – namely, that it gives the appearance that he is hollow inside. Schiele preserved his more allegorical, symbolic works for the medium of oil; paintings such as Hermits discussed earlier, and thus, this hollowness cannot be overlooked as having greater metaphorical meaning, and would suggest the reasons behind why Schieles self-portraiture varied to such a large degree; namely, that the inner self which Schiele was desperate to uncover, was absent, or simply defined as a mad, glowing redness. â€Å"[S]pastic and hunch-backed, or with a rachitic deformation of the ribcage: this was the artist as an image of abject misery – a cripple [†¦] the dirty colouring, with its shrill accents, makes the flesh tones ugly and aberrant. In Seated Male Nude, a self-portrait, the artist mutates into an insect. The absence of feet [†¦] [is] an amputation. This is a mangled soul in a mangled body. We see through the body into the soul.† Indeed, the mangled soul is non-existent, the inside is hollow and empty. So, insomuch as this is similarly affected by social and cultural developments at the time, Schiele is moreover offering a more detailed and theoretically astute reading of the self and warring and dissolute factions. Schroeder says that: â€Å"If all of these self-dramatizations reveal the true nucleus of the painters psyche, then he must have been a fragmented personality, unlikely to escape the diagnostic attentions of the genius Sigmund Freud. The question is just how much of his psyche is conveyed by his self-portraits, either those with grimaces or those that express a frozen resignation? What and whom does Egon Schiele really see in his studio mirror? [†¦] It makes all the difference in the world whether he is observing his own body as an act of direct, emotional self-knowledge or whether in his imagination he is slipping into someone elses role and experiencing his own self as that of another person.† So, that Schiele depicts himself as a variety of different people doesnt necessarily mean that he is living up to a certain artistic function; in a sense, glamorizing the role of the artist as a suffering person. Art As Pornography Schiele has been regarded by many critics as a pornographer. Looking at his paintings, which often draw attention to the genitals, to eroticized regions of the human body, as well as the contorted and mechanistic quality to the nude portraits, which appear twisted and exploited. Schiele was eventually put in prison for his indecency, although this was due to his eccentric practice of showing his work to the friends of the children who were painted, often nude. Schroder suggests that â€Å"[i]n Schieles early pictures of children the objective embarrassment of the models lowly social origins is reinforced by the embarrassment of their obscene nakedness.† This would suggest that the portraits themselves are designed to be as exploitative and as pornographic as possible. The children portrayed are certainly seen in an especially lurid light; and their embarrassment is portrayed by their forced poses, the absence of environment, etc. However, it is often difficult, at the time and later, to extrapolate eroticism from pornography, and in Schiele, this is particularly difficult. Schiele himself denied accusations of pornography, and certainly, the nudes have greater substance and meaning in terms of formulating an Expressionist identity of the self. Mitsch suggests that Schiele â€Å"expresses [in his eroticism] human bondage and is to be understood as a burden that is painful to bear. Aimed, from the beginning, at outspokenness and truthfulness, it assumes almost inevitably a daring form.† So, here difficulty with regarding Schieles output is highlighted. The work is about expressing human bondage, but it is also exaggerated and mutilated and â€Å"outspoken†. So Schiele acts as both pornographer and eroticist, and also strikes out more clearly at exposing the truth behind the body. Schiele himself commented on accusations that his work is pornographic made by his Uncle, by replying in a letter, saying that â€Å"the erotic work of art is scared too.† The painting Reclining Girl In A Blue Dress (1910), establishes this difficulty. In it, a girl is portrayed, leaning back and revealing her genitals. Her genitals are high-lighted in white, and draw the eye to the girls genitals using both composition and colour. The brush-strokes are strikingly crude, almost sketchy. Fischer says that â€Å"[i]t is impossible to defend this picture against the charge of pornography. Even so, Schieles radicalism of form places him beyond too simplistic a categorisation.† He goes on to say: â€Å"He was not merely out to satisfy a shallow voyeuristic impulse. Pubescent lust and delight in discovery, the naà ¯ve symbolism of distinguishing sexual features, and boyish stratagems for looking up girls skirts are combined in the twenty-year-old artists way of viewing the world with the invention of ingenious new forms, which took the Schiele of 1910 a step forward, out of the world of teachers and uncles and into the radical world view of the Expressionist avant-garde. In the years ahead, Schiele pursued this distinctive combination obsessively.† So, according to Fischer, even though his work was pornographic, the forms in which this pornography took and the means by which Schiele painted these pornographic images, allowed us to question the nature of the images and thus elevate them to something beyond pornography. Schiele was certainly obsessed with portraying the self: his images, despite being, at times, shamelessly provocative and deliberately controversial to the conservative Viennese public (the pre-conceived role of an artist to challenge the perception of the ordinary people would stress this, and was a certain depiction of the artist that Schiele would live by), would also put stress on the techniques and the principles applied to the painting in order to elevate it beyond mere titillation or voyeurism. In his nudes, Schiele was definitely looking to get closer to his, and societies view of the human condition in the confusing wake of secularism, the transmogrification of belief toward the self (in Freud and Nietzsche, for instance), and the selfs role in society. Naturally his view is not a particularly optimistic one, and he is frequently out to establish the pain in the heart of the self – his cut-off, mutilated and distorted figures serve to expose the more desultory aspects of the self, and thus his images appear less as pornographic, and more as pieces that actually challenge and oppose the traditionally porno

Free Essays - Evil in To Kill A Mockingbird :: Kill Mockingbird essays

Evil in To Kill A Mockingbird "Our greatest evils flow from ourselves" (Tripp 192). This statement, by Rousseau, epitomizes many points of evil that are discussed in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. In our world today, we are stared in the face everyday with many facets of evil. These nefarious things come in several forms, including, but not limited to discrimination of sex, race, ethnicity, physical appearance, and popularity, alcoholism, drug abuse, irresponsibility, and even murder. The occurrences of evil and wrong-doing in To Kill A Mockingbird further along Scout's maturation into a young woman. Three of the most important instances of evil are those of racism, alcoholism, and gossip. Dispersed within To Kill A Mockingbird are numerous illustrations of racism. Statements such as "You father's no better than the niggers and trash he works for" (Lee 108) seem to be common through the entire novel. This seemed to bother people of the common day, and this drove many people to deem Lee's book "banned" from their school. If we look back to the times when the book was written, we can understand the use of the "N-word." During the Great Depression, and at many times during the early twentieth century, the "N-word" was used as commonly as many people today use the word "work." It seems as though people either didn't think, or didn't care, about how demeaning "nigger" was. Eventually, some African-Americans came to accept this word. They became so used to hearing it, they heeded it no attention. Atticus Finch, Scout's father, however, had a different way of thinking. Although Atticus was Caucasian, he realized that the "N-word" (as commonly referred to in the recent trial of Orenthal James Simpson) was wrong to say. He instructed his children not to use that word either. This courtesy did not catch on. People continued to refer to African-Americans as "niggers" and called anyone who was kind to "niggers" a "nigger-lover." Scout realized this, and as she grew older, she came to realize how wrong the use of the "N-word" actually was. She assumed, as a child, that because everyone else used it, that it was perfectly fine for her to use.

Orange County 1960s: The Conservative Movement :: Political Science Politics

Orange County 1960's: The conservative movement The conservative movement that arose in the Orange Country during the 60's had many different contradictory attitudes. Some people thought of it as a meaningless span of time in which the government had been put on pause while others saw it as a crucial foundation for America's future. McGirr clearly seems to be no follower for Orange County conservatism, but she is still able to keep her disagreements from breaking through in her writing. McGirr gives the audience an understanding the ‘60s political struggles, one in which even conservatives proposed radical ideas that fundamentally reshaped the political and cultural landscape. Since most of Orange County residents in the ‘50s and ‘60s were migrants, largely from the Midwest, did not necessarily make them traditionalists. These migrants, McGirr writes, mixed with Orange County's "cultural traditions, its conservative regional elite, its mode of development... [to provide] the ingredients from which the Right would create a movement. First, there were the ‘old-timers,' the large ranchers and small farmers, merchants, shop owners, and middle-class townspeople who had embraced a strong individualism and strict morals for many years. Added to this older conservatism were the southland's ‘cowboy capitalists,' the new boom-time entrepreneurs who made their fortunes in the post - World War II era of affluence and spent their capital and their energy spreading the gospel of laissez-faire capitalism and an anti-Washington ethos. Together with ranchers-turned-property-developers, county boosters, and real estate speculators, they created a built w orld that affirmed the values of privacy, individualism, and property rights and weakened a sense of cohesive community, providing an opening for organizations, churches, and missionary zealots that could provide one." Orange County's contradictory anti-state philosophy that dominated a place founded by the government and heavily dependent on the government was clearly abundant to McGirr. Military bases and high-tech manufacturing for defense purposes was key to the economic growth in the 1950s and ‘60s. Suburban Warriors portrays activists of the John Birch Society, the Christian Anticommunist Crusade against the New Deal and wimpy not because they were victims of liberalism but because they were beneficiaries with moral passion to spare. Orange County became one of the fastest growing counties in America in the 1950s because it was a paradise of homeowners, "a developer's dream come true." Conservative political ideology, often considered an anti-modern worldview, attracted a large number of people in the most technologically advanced and economically effervescent of American locales.

Classic Hollywood in Comedy Films

During Hollywood's classical period, the seamless style was particularly favored, it championed narrative economy. In other words, films were constructed so that the viewer was not aware of the construction. This practice of effacing a film's construction actually depends on a complex system of visual codes. Hollywood films, as opposed to art films or some types of foreign films, embrace a narrative that is highly efficient and that is determined by cause and effect. For example, The opening of a film typically plunges us_ _into an immediate understanding of an individual character. While natural causes, like floods and earthquakes, or societal causes, such as wars or strikes, might prod the character in a certain direction or serve as a backdrop, the narrative inevitably centers on the individual's choices. This swift movement toward resolution of the conflict has been made efficiently in what is often referred to as the three-act structure. As celebrated screenwriter Ernest Lehman put it more clearly, â€Å"In the first act, it's who are the people and what is the situation of this whole story. The second act is the progression of that situation to a high point of conflict. And the third act is how the conflicts and problems are resolved. † Though modern films frequently depart from the continuity style, this style remains a baseline standard of effective visual storytelling. During the classical Hollywood era, each studio was known for a certain genre of film or a particular roster of stars. Spencer Tracy, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin were some of the well-known performers that emerged during this period. Comic films began to appear in significant numbers during the era of silent films in roughly 1895 to 1930. The visual humor of these silent films relied on slapstick. A very early comedy short was Watering the Gardener (1895) by the Lumiere brothers. In American film, the most prominent comic actors of the silent era were Charlie Chaplin. A popular trend during the 1920s and afterward was comedy in the form of animated cartoons with stars such as Betty Boo appearing. Toward the end of the 1920s, the introduction of sound into movies made possible dramatic new film styles and the use of verbal humor. Many film scholars will argue, film was never entirely â€Å"silent. † Most movies were accompanied by some kind of music and even, at times, live narration. During the 1930s the silent film comedy was replaced by dialogue from film comedians such as the W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers. The comedian Charlie Chaplin was one of the last silent film hold-outs. 1930 and 1948 are generally considered bookends to Hollywood's Golden Age, the period when these eight companies secured 95 percent of all film rentals and close to 70 percent of all box-office receipts. In the United Kingdom, film adaptations of stage farces were popular in the early 1930s, while the music hall tradition strongly influenced film comedy into the 1940s. With the entry of the United States into World War II, Hollywood became focused on themes related to the conflict. Comedies portrayed military themes such as service, civil defense, boot-camp. The war-time restrictions on travel made this a boom time for Hollywood, and nearly a quarter of the money spent on attending movies. As TV became filled with family-oriented comedies, the 1950s saw a trend toward more adult social situations. Only the Walt Disney studios continued to steadily release family comedies. The release of comedy films also went into a decline during this decade. Toward the end of the 1950s, darker humor and more serious themes had begun to emerge, including satire and social commentary. Dr. Strangelove (1964) was a satirical comedy about Cold War paranoia. Among the leading lights in comedy films of the next decade were Woody Allen and Mel Brooks. Both wrote, directed and appeared in their movies. Brooks' style was generally slapstick and zany in nature, often parodying film styles and genres, including Universal horror films (Young Frankenstein), westerns (Blazing Saddles) and Hitchcock films (High Anxiety). Most British comedy films of the early 70s were spin-offs of television series, including Dad's Army and On the Buses. The greatest successes, however, came with the films of the Monty Python team, including _And Now For Something Completely Different_ (1971), One of the major developments of the 1990s was the re-emergence of the romantic comedy film, encouraged by the success of When Harry Met Sally†¦ n 1989 Another development was the increasing use of â€Å"gross-out humor† usually aimed at a younger audience, in films like _There's Something About_ Mary__, American Pie) and its sequels. In mid 2000s the trend of â€Å"gross-out† movies is continuing, with adult-oriented comedies picking up the box office. The screwball comedy is a subgenre of the co medy film genre. It has proven to be one of the most popular and enduring film genres. First gained prominence in 1934 with It Happened One Night and, although many film scholars would agree that its classic period ended ometime in the early 1940s, elements of the genre have persisted, or have been paid homage to, in contemporary film. Modern screwball comedies include: Burn After Reading (2008), d. Joel and Ethan Coen Pineapple Express) (2008) d. David Gordon Green The Hangover) (2009) d. Todd Phillips Many elements of the screwball genre can be traced back to such stage plays such as ‘__As You Like_ It_’and and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Like farce, screwball comedies often involve mistaken identities or other circumstances in which a character or characters try to keep some important fact a secret. Sometimes screwball comedies feature male characters cross-dressing, further contributing to the misunderstandings (Bringing Up Baby, I Was a Male War Bride, Some Like It Hot). They also involve a central romantic story, usually in which the couple seem mismatched and even hostile to each other at first, and â€Å"meet cute† in some way. Another common element is fast-talking, witty repartee (You Can't Take It With You), His Girl Friday). This stylistic device did not originate in the screwballs (although it may be argued to have reached its zenith there): it can also be found in many of the old Hollywood cycles including the gangster film, romantic comedies, and others. The philosopher Stanley Cavell has noted that many classic screwball comedies turn on an interlude in the state of Connecticut (Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve, The Awful Truth Some notable directors of screwball comedies include: Frank Capra George Cukor Howard Hawks